Bob Weston of Weston Homes (Letters, 25 March) is right that we're pitifully scraping along at nearly half the 240,000 new homes we need to build each year. That's why the Treasury must now fire the second barrel of its budget housing shotgun. Extending public loan guarantees for public, not just private, housebuilding could bring over £100bn of long-term institutional investment into social house building through housing associations and councils. Let's build much more social housing, not smear immigrants for living in it.Matthew OakeshottLib Dem, House of Lords

• Ian Birrell (Our politics, cheapened, 26 March) is right that the Border Agency is ineffective, but his conclusions are vague. If migrants are young, then they are particularly likely to affect the job chances of young Britons, particularly young black men, who are already suffering high rates of unemployment. Moreover, migrants have to live somewhere and so the problems of the housing market cannot but be exacerbated by immigration. The same issue of the Guardian claims that 37% of the 8.1 million Londoners were not born in the UK. That's nearly 3 million migrants – an awful lot of houses.Joshua SchwiesoSpaxton, Somerset

• Rough sleepers from central and eastern Europe make up almost a third of London's homeless. Despite this, the City of London and Lambeth are cutting funding for specialist charity Barka UK. Barka (barge in Polish) serves as a lifeboat for rough sleepers, giving excluded migrants the opportunity to reconnect with their families, rehabilitate in projects in Poland and reintegrate into society. Since 2007, Barka has helped almost 3,000 migrant rough sleepers return home. Roger Roberts Lib Dem, House of Lords

• It's amusing to read of David Cameron trumpeting about the damage immigration is doing to the services/jobs/housing of we native Brits. Then within 24 hours his government announces proudly that the emergency rescue helicopter service is going to a Texas-based company which will build half the helicopters in the US – the latest in a run of contracts going to overseas companies So it's wrong for foreign people to come here to do low-skilled work for low pay, but it's fine for well-paid, skilled jobs or valuable contracts to go abroad to generate employment for foreigners there. Is this another example of how well unrestricted free markets work?Graham Dunn Chorley, Lancashire

• The unspoken truth is that migrants from poorer economies will, given the appropriate agency packaging, work for dole wages in a richer economy with mass unemployment. This of course is "good for the economy". In much the same way that slavery would be.Peter McKennaLiverpool

• In the late 1970s and 80s Thatcher sought to nullify the growing support for the National Front by adopting the NF's rhetoric. Today we see Cameron adopting the same tactic to see off Ukip. But he is taking it one step further by also adopting their policies. Anthony GoldLondon